Tools For Writers: Storyboarding Can Save Your Work

If you’ve anytime apprehend Shakespeare’s Othello you apparently apperceive that the titular appearance kills his admired Desdemona by baking her with a pillow. She again laments with her final line, “Nobody; I myself. Farewell: Commend me to my affectionate lord: O, farewell!” if Emilia asks who asleep her.

Now, if you’re like me, you’d apparently not be able to appear aback from the asleep to eek out that final band if anyone has just smothered you with a pillow; neither would you acceptable die afterwards authoritative this statement. Sure, some may say she got an aneurism, which is what absolutely asleep her afterwards Othello’s bootless attempt; but those humans are reaching.

The artifice aperture in Shakespeare’s archetypal play is not altered to the bard. Many writers accept larboard cogent artifice holes or errors in their works, either as a aftereffect of afterlight or editing, or artlessly a aberration in the writing. So how can you, as a writer, abstain autograph about a appearance who has a cigarette in duke who walks into a warehouse, and somehow the gas aperture in the barn is not afire (because al of a sudden the cigarette has magically disappeared)?

Filmmakers advance a apparatus that a lot of writers do not use but should: storyboarding. If you are not accustomed with what this is, I acclaim accomplishing a little analysis and implementing it in your own process. Storyboarding is about a clear adaptation of anniversary scene, depicted on alone “boards” or panels. Filmmakers use them to align and adapt scenes in a blur for purposes of flow, consistency, and beheld appeal. They advice because a lot of films are not fabricated in a beeline fashion, but rather attempt as alone scenes and again “cut” into the final work. My own autograph is done in this way: I address alone capacity or sometimes just scenes, and again cut it all calm in the end afore revision.

Storyboarding can advice even if you address in a beeline fashion. If you can see the “shot” as a drawing, it can advice you bigger anticipate the character’s perspective; it can advice you characterization altered elements that you’d like to call so you don’t abort to acquaint the clairvoyant that the sky was aphotic or that the mountains in the border appeared to be annoyed because of the dust storm that was approaching; and it can advice you apprehension that abuse cigarette in Jose’s duke just afore he enters the warehouse. The account can advice admonish you to address in that Jose flicked the cigarette abroad just afore entering the gas-filled warehouse, appropriately allowance him abstain a alarming death.